Emily is enjoying an Italian holiday with her fiance, Jed, and family when the unthinkable happens. Jed's teenage daughter Dee Dee is found dead. As the family return to London and try to put the pieces together, Emily gets a text stating it should have been her that died.

Spurred on by her ex-boyfriend Dan, a reporter, she starts to think that she was the intended target. As she digs deeper into Jed's family members, the threats continue to build. Jed doesn't believe that the death is anything but an accident, and cracks start to develop in their relationship. Will she find the killer before the killer finds her?

Here We Lie is the first book I've read by Sophie McKenzie. The story is told in different viewpoints, with Emily in the modern day, her sister Rose in the past, and Dee Dee's diary entries. I wasn't entirely sure of the purpose of Rose's viewpoints, they didn't really add much to the story for me.

I found it to be a compelling mystery, and I kept reading eager to find out what had happened and who was responsible. However, I found the story incredibly melodramatic and frequently found myself rolling my eyes. The reveal required several characters to act completely contrary to their established personalities, and didn't make sense to me. I can't elaborate on that without some major spoilers, but it really did affect my enjoyment of the story.

If you enjoy a good thriller/mystery then do give this a go. It's a compelling story that will keep you wondering to the end.

On holiday with family and her adoring fiance, Jed, Emily couldn't be happier. But overnight, the idyllic trip turns into a waking nightmare when one of the group is found dead in what appears to be a terrible accident.

The devastated party returns to London to cope with their loss while trying to resume their normal lives. But new revelations shed a shocking light on the holiday tragedy and set Emily on a perilous journey to discover the truth about what happened.

2 comments:

Thrillers are hard for me to get into. I've always thought of suspense as a crucial element of good fiction, but thrillers tend to over-do it and either make it seem cliche and over the top (when they're bad) or make me feel antsy and uncomfortable (when they're good.) The different viewpoints thing makes Here We Lie sound appealing, but it doesn't seem like McKenzie even fully realizes that device's potential.

I've seen it get very good reviews elsewhere, but it seemed to me a case of a character suddenly being a completely different person from who they had been presented as both in the present and in the past.